Christian Huitema wrote on 2022-01-24 12:15:
...
Like others, I have mixed feelings about the kind of proxying proposed
in the 5G design. It does look like a power grab by the telecom
companies, force all user traffic through a telco managed proxy, getting
an observation point to see all the user traffic, do all the kind of
"statistics" we could expect in these days of surveillance capitalism,
and be in a position to control how much bandwidth is allocated to
specific content providers.
i think calling it a power grab when it's done by an internet transit
connectivity provider (such as "the telecom companies") makes sense, but
that without clarification, could connote untenable meanings.
managed private networks, such as enterprise, government, university,
small office / home office, and home / family networks, already have the
power you describe, and will preserve the status quo at "whatever cost"
the ietf may impose.
i pray that we will consistently disambiguate. there will be no wide
area UDP on most managed private networks. we can either pressure these
networks with endpoint failures (to strong arm them into abandoning
their historic powers), or we can rely on fallback (which for new
protocols may be more fragile than for the existing WWW), or we can
negotiate, in ways approximately alike to the "proxying proposed in the
5G design". those are our choices -- there is no fourth way.
if the ietf wishes to disintermediate on-path actors, then we ought to
consistently and carefully identify where the power is (managed private
edge networks, and endpoints), and avoid antagonizing those power holders.
The only good effect is that proxying will
hide the actual user location from the content providers, which removes
a bit of data from the surveillance capitalism dragnet. But overall,
that's not great, and I would rather not have a feature like that on my
phone. But hey, that's my opinion, people may differ. And I wonder
whether that has much relevance to IETF work.
if the ietf's mission is to impose societal change, then explicit
negotiated proxy service may not be relevant. however if the ietf's
mission is to create technology that supports generally desirable work
flows, then proxy discovery/negotiation is vitally relevant to that.
several networks i operate and many that i'm aware of will have to do
content inspection. there will be no free lunch for IoT (which is an
instance of "surveillance capitalism dragnet"). the ietf has to decide
whether to oppose, or ignore, or cooperate with that reality.
--
P Vixie
